First there’s the fact that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, meaning you acquire a handful of baby books, all of which give you conflicting information and leave you more confused than you were originally. You spend half your pregnancy avoiding prawns and the other half avoiding Camembert only to find out that both are probably fine. Speaking of pregnancy, you’ll need a pair of those hugely attractive elasticised jeans (cringe), and spend 9 months in thongs because your feet are so fat you look like the elephant man.

Before the baby comes you need to organise the big ticket items – a pram (on which you can blow a couple of grand if you end up purchasing a Silver Cross), cot, change table, nursery furniture and baby monitor. Then there’s the clothes which they grow out of in a week. And you’ll want to stock up on nappies. Linen for the cot. Special toiletries. Then there’s the extra washing. Hanging out 8 zillion tiny little socks triples your laundry time.

You buy lots of useless things ‘just in case’. A wearable baby monitor was a waste of $180 when we discovered it didn’t clip on to disposable nappies properly. We also stocked up on wraps. Now I have 20 of the things which are redundant as we’re using plain old cot sheets which are much bigger (read: harder to wriggle out of). You buy lullaby CD’s then forget where you’ve put them.

Luckily there’s no need to buy any soft toys as well-meaning relatives will give you enough weird-looking bears and animals to upholster a padded cell, which you’ll also need after about day 4 of becoming a parent.

Ah, but it’s all good fun.

The pic, of course, is of my son Tyler.

What a fabulous resource for designers with many pre-made schemes from other users plus a simple upload tool to create your own from an existing photo. Not only can you play around with endless colour possibilities, but once you’ve put together a scheme you can download the swatches directly to Photoshop as an .ase file. Each swatch’s CMYK, RGB, LAB, HEX & HSV values are displayed for easy reference.

Why am I only just discovering this now?!?! I can see this becoming one of those wonderful time-wasters…

21st July 08: EDIT: Ah, I see these kind of tools are popping up everywhere, here’s another one: http://inthemod.com/

I came across this site recently… a open community project aiming to translate the entire Bible into lolcat. What in the name of Corinthians is lolcat you might ask?

It seems to be (and correct me if I’m wrong) something like a web 2.0 adaptation of pidgin English; embracing hastily typed messages and spelling errors and morphing them into some kind of shorthand decipherable only by assorted gen Y’ers, geeks and n00bs. It’s actually incredibly complicated linguistically, as shown here on lolspeak 101, and is a very different ball game to abbreviated text message-speak – gr8 c u l8r – etc.

You can check out the bible’s progress here.

Is it just me or do people have waaaay to much time on their hands?

In May 2008 Friends Reunited announced that the site is now completely free to use, a great initiative but perhaps one that wasn’t implemented fast enough to combat users switching to the massively popular Facebook. Friends Reunited’s press release states that they are now focussing on the 30+ age bracket – a demographic that doesn’t necessarily see social networking as a natural, organic process, with improved privacy controls to encourage more open communication.

The rise and rise of social networking sites illustrates how many people accross a wide range of demographics are interested reconnecting with old mates via an online presence.

Jonathan Clark, Head of Friends Reunited, states that “Ignoring all the hype around social networking, the simple fact is these tools can make friendships stronger and keep friends more involved in each others’ lives. Social networking is still not mainstream for the over 30s and we can change that. We’ve the scale and, importantly, eight years of trust, content and relationships. These are just the first of many new features we’ll be adding this year. We’re just flicking the switch and turning this on; it’s going to be like smashing down the dam after years of holding the water back.”

Friends Reunited differs from the rest in that they also have genealogy, employment and dating sites in their stable, but I wonder if they have missed the boat a little in the social networking department, or is it Facebook that will need to play catch up?

Nick’s book, Toodoodlist , is a guide to uncomplicating and de-teching your life. You’d imagine that espousing the virtues of notebooks and pens might fall on deaf ears in today’s super tech-savvy society, but it all makes sense in a beautifully simplistic way. I’m no stranger to spending hours trying to learn how to use a program that’s supposed to make my life easier and data retrieval quicker. Bit silly isn’t it?

Using paper & pen is faster, vastly cheaper, you already know how to use them (one hopes), they don’t require charging or powerpoints, aren’t eclipsed by a newer model every 5 seconds, don’t cause LCD-screen headaches, plus, to my knowledge, you can’t get booked for scribbling whilst driving.

Ditch the PDA and live by the pen!

I’ve been avoiding calling Telstra’s billing enquiries line for 3 months now, which in turn has cost me $150 more than it should have. How bad must things be when a customer would rather pay that kind of money in unnecessary fees rather than actually ring your call centre to fix it? It’s often such a saga trying to deal with phone companies – I have yet to meet one who’s people did not leave me feeling more confused after I called than before (of course Telstra aren’t the only culprit by a long shot, but they serve as my focus for the purposes of this rant).

So the issue was thus: I recently dropped down my fixed monthly cost plan and was told at the time that there would be no extra charges, it’s all fixed for you ma’am, and by the way your contract runs out in June and would you like to renew it? Uh… no thanks.

Fast forward to the next billing period and I receive a bill for twice what I was previously paying. A complicated phone call later and I believe I have sorted out the problem. Nope – my next bill is still showing the wrong amount. Now I just think ‘stuff it’ and pay the thing because I don’t have the emotional strength to deal with another ‘customer care’ person (what a total misnomer).

Today I discovered I had a rare hour of spare time to devote solely to telco gobbledygook so I bit the bullet and called Telstra.

To my utter surprise I had the pleasure of dealing with a call centre rep who not only explained things to me in plain English but actually fixed the problem, AND waived a fee, AND he sounded like he actually wanted to be at work.

Hooray! At long last the phrase customer service is actually put into practice. A positive attitude is such a simple thing, but it can have such a great and lasting effect on customers.

Dammit, I can’t remember his name but if I did I would recommend him for some sort of award.

French designer Stephanie Marin has created wonderfully tactile ‘stones’ as modular seating, bringing the outdoors in and turning living spaces into playful, serene cocoons of relaxation.

From 15cm to 2m wide, Livingstones are available in a range of natural earthy colours for both indoor and outdoor use. At around USD$128 for the 30cm stone, I’ll have to be content with admiring them from afar, but if you’re interested they are available to purchase from Olozoo.

Check out the full range at Livingstones.

FAILblog.org

As a little girl (and as the ‘arty one’), I was taught uncial, blackletter and gothic scripts sitting at her Formica kitchen table. We borrowed books from the library on The Book of Kells and tried to recreate gilt-laden Celtic pages with black, silver and molten gold inks.

This was a practice piece I did – and yes, it is a list of dates from the 1994 Ren & Stimpy Diary (c’mon I was only a little tacker at the time):

We sucked, of course, but perhaps that was my watershed moment. I’m still putting together page layouts today, and loving it.

So whatever happened to beautiful writing on beautiful paper?

A few years ago, the Next Big Thing was that communication would become totally electronic, automatic, e-this, e-that, with no time or space in our busy lifestyles for old-fashioned paper. The future was symbolised by the paperless office. This has become a reality to some degree – communication in business is almost always done via email, company letterhead is almost defunct, friends email and IM each other instead of posting a letter. Even photographs have gone the way of the dodo, replaced by jpegs on a hard drive.

But there is a backlash towards this high-speed, impersonal, function-without-beauty trend - a resurgence of the art of the pen. Receiving a hand-written letter is an event; posh paper shops are popping up all over the place; and the rarity and specialness of beautiful, tactile papers is reflected in their price tags.

Personalised, decorative office stationery is a strong trend at the moment with stores such as kikki.K and Smiggle catering to the worldwide obsession with customisation. Even Officeworks is in on the act. There’s thousands of handmade cards, notebooks, gift tags and writing sets for sale on Etsy. And scrapbooking is taking over the world like some sort of Laura Ashley-clad Godzilla.

Personally, I’m glad paper is back. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to write a letter to my Nan.

http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/